His problem seemed clear now. He must combine two apparent irreconcilables—militancy and moderation. At Boston University, he had learned from Hegel how to synthesize opposites. But that had been in the realm of theory. This was the real thing. People’s lives and destiny—his own life and destiny—were at stake now. He stared at the paper again, pondering the militant angle of his speech. At issue was black people’s self-respect. If they took the Rosa Parks incident lying down, they would violate their own dignity, not to mention “the eternal edicts of God Himself.” But he must balance this with an appeal to Christian love….
By the time he had sketched a mental outline, he had to go. He had not eaten since breakfast, but there was no time for food. When he reached Holt Street Baptist a short while later, he was astonished at what he saw: police cars were circling the area, and hundreds of people, thousands of them, were milling about the church, unable to get inside. On the roof, a loudspeaker broadcast the proceedings from the sanctuary, and from time to time the throng outside broke into cheers.
It took fifteen minutes for King to park his car and make his way into the church. It had been packed since five that afternoon, and the other MIA leaders were transported with excitement. There was not an empty seat anywhere in the sanctuary; people spilled into the aisles and through the doorways in back. After preliminary songs and speeches, King stood at the pulpit, looking out over a row of television cameras at a sea of expectant black faces.
“We’re here this evening for serious business,” he said, speaking without notes. “We’re here in a general sense because first and foremost, we are American citizens, and we are determined to acquire our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.” His implication was clear to everyone present: the critical element in race relations was the flagrant discrepancy between American ideals and practices so far as Negroes were concerned. But their protest was a revolt within the system, not against it. They were out to reform, not tear down.
“But we are here in a specific sense because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to get the situation corrected.” He rehearsed what had happened to Rosa Parks, who sat behind him, a dignified, bespectacled woman and the heroine of the hour. After recalling the abuses and indignities blacks had suffered on the buses, he sounded his militant call to action. “But there comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.” The crowd was with him now, responding in bursts of shouts and applause. “We have no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved, to be saved from patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.” There was a chorus of “well” and “amen.”
He spoke of the divisions and apathy that had immobilized them in the past. “I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together. Unity is the great need of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire, but which we justly deserve.” And they were not wrong in what they were doing. “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie.” The crowd rode on the waves of his oratory, stamping and cheering in a frenzy of excitement.
Now that he had them aroused, though, he turned to caution. Theirs was not a violent movement, not a black counterpart of the White Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan. “In our protest, there will be no cross burnings. No white person will be taken from his home by a hooded Negro mob and brutally murdered. There will be no threats and intimidation. We will be guided by the highest principles of law and order.” Their method was persuasion, not coercion. They would say to people, “Let your conscience be your guide.” Moreover, “our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal.” And he recited Christ’s admonition: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.” He pleaded, “If we fail to do this our protest will end up as a meaningless drama on the stage of history, and its memory will be shrouded with the ugly garments of shame. In spite of the mistreatment that we have confronted we must not become bitter, and end up by hating our white brothers. As Booker T. Washington said, ‘Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.’
“If we protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, of black people, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization.’”
It had all come pouring out in sixteen minutes of inspired extemporizing. It was as though he had been preparing for this speech all his life—as though his doubts and reaffirmations about the ministry, his courses and readings and reflections in college, had been intended for this ringing moment.
He sat down, trembling from his effort. Across the church, people were yelling and waving their arms, clapping and singing as he had never seen them do before. Imagine Martin Luther King, a twenty-six-year-old scholar, making people rock with such emotion. “It was the most stimulating thing I have ever heard,” one man said. “Nobody dreamed of Martin Luther King being that sort of man under these conditions.” Said Rufus Lewis: “This was the time that the people were brought face to face with the type of man that Martin Luther [King] was—not only the people who came to the mass meeting, but those who nominated him, too. That was the great awakening. It was astonishing, the man spoke with so much force.”
Abernathy was standing at the pulpit now, reading the MIA’s demands to the bus lines and the city officials. First, they must guarantee that bus drivers treat Negroes courteously. Second, passengers must be seated on a first-come, first-serve basis, Negroes sitting from the back forward and whites from the front backward. Third, Negro drivers must be employed at once on predominantly Negro routes. Until these demands were met, the Negroes of Montgomery would stay off the buses in a display of determination and solidarity.
“It has been moved and seconded that the resolution as read will be received and adopted,” King sang out. “Are you ready for the question?” “Yes!” the crowd roared back. “All in favor let it be known by standing on your feet.” Crying out in ecstasy, the great congregation rose en masse.
King had to leave now, to speak at a Negro YMCA banquet. But “my heart was full,” he recalled, for he was convinced that no historian could ever describe the meeting this night. “The victory is already won,” he reflected, “no matter how long we struggle to attain the three points of the resolution. The real victory was in the mass meeting, where thousands of black people stood revealed with a new sense of dignity and destiny.” Still, he had to concede that their mild demands were only a “temporary alleviation” of the bus problem. In fact, they did not meet the NAACP’s minimum standard for civil-rights demands, and the NAACP remained initially uninvolved. The truth was that the MIA seating arrangement could easily be accommodated within Montgomery’s segregation ordinance. The MIA’s chief hope was that the Parks case would ultimately result in a court order against bus segregation. Meanwhile Montgomery Negroes would continue to protest, applying pressure through direct action as well as through the courts. Above all, the boycott would give the people a sense of involvement and contribution. This had been lacking in the work of the NAACP, which favored legal battles over direct-action campaigns that involv
ed the Negro people. Here in Montgomery, the MIA intended to combine NAACP-style legal action with grassroots protest.
King marveled at what was happening here. He called it “the miracle of Montgomery.” A month before he would not have thought a bus boycott possible. Now he saw it as “the culmination of a slowly developing process.” To be sure, Rosa Parks’s arrest was “the precipitating factor” in the protest, but not the cause. No, it was really the story of 50,000 Negroes who just got tired of injustice and who “were willing to substitute tired feet for tired souls.”
Yet there was “a divine dimension” at work here, too. As the Almighty labored to create “a harmony out of the discords of the universe,” King mused, He had selected Montgomery, Alabama, “as the proving ground for the struggle and triumph of freedom and justice in America.” And was this not symbolically significant? For Montgomery was the birthplace and first capital of the old slave-based Confederacy. How sublime it would be to transform this “cradle of the Confederacy” into a cradle of freedom and brotherhood.
What was more, King felt that he had been chosen as an instrument of God’s will, to inspire his people and help effect this transformation. How else explain his speech this night? For the first time he understood what older preachers meant when they said, “Open your mouth and God will speak for you.”
WITH THE BOYCOTT UNDER WAY IN EARNEST, King assembled an MIA strategy committee that met for hours at a time in various Negro homes. They were an outspoken and animated lot—four ministers, three Alabama State professors, a businessman, and a lawyer, debating their next step in late-night sessions in someone’s living room. They epitomized the professional and business class that had furnished Negro leadership since the formation of the NAACP. Of them all, Abernathy was the most influential, standing second only to King in power and influence. When the boycott began, Abernathy claimed that he could have become the leader. Instead, he said, he chose to stand with King “as Caleb stood with Moses.”
On Thursday, December 8, King and a special MIA deputation filed into the commissioners’ chamber in City Hall, to meet with Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, Commissioners Clyde Sellers and Frank A. Parks, and two representatives of the bus company, all of whom had reluctantly agreed to a hearing. As they sat in chairs in front of the commissioners’ table, with reporters and television cameramen gathering around, King gazed on the city fathers with optimism. Surely they were basically decent men who would comprehend the rightness of the Negroes’ complaints and accede to their demands.
“Who is the spokesman?” Mayor Gayle asked, opening the session. The other Negroes looked to King. “All right,” the mayor said, “come forward and make your statement.”
At the table, in the glare of television cameras, King explained to the white men why the boycott had begun. He cited the abuses of the drivers and other humiliations Negroes had to suffer on the buses, told how patient they had been, recalled how they had tried to negotiate in recent months but to no avail. Then he presented the MIA’s three demands, pointing out that the first-come, first-serve seating arrangement was already in operation in Nashville, Atlanta, and Mobile, each of which remained as segregated as Montgomery. The Negroes were trying not to change the law, but to gain reforms within the law. As for driver courtesy, King said, “This is the least that any business can grant to its patrons.” As for Negro drivers, “it seems to me that it would make good business sense for the company to seek employees from the ranks of its largest patronage.” In closing, King promised that Negroes would conduct their protest on the highest level of restraint and dignity, thus gaining justice for whites as well as blacks.
He returned to his chair, certain that his rational and sensible statement would win the city fathers over. They talked among themselves, pressed “Preacher King” on certain points, and then nodded their assent when the bus company’s attorney—a man named Crenshaw—maintained that the MIA seating arrangement would blatantly violate city law. At that Mayor Gayle adjourned the meeting, and the newsmen left.
The mayor summoned King to the table, said that he and a few of his people should stay behind and try to work something out with the men from the bus company. As the smaller group gathered around the table, Commissioner Parks told Crenshaw in a quiet voice, “I don’t see why we can’t arrange to accept the seating proposal. We can work it within our segregation laws.” King glanced at Crenshaw. “But, Frank,” Crenshaw said, “I don’t see how we can do it within the law. If it were legal I would be the first to go along with it; but it just isn’t legal. The only way that it can be done is to change your segregation laws.” Parks said nothing. “If we granted the Negroes these demands,” Crenshaw went on, “they would go about boasting of a victory that they had won over the white people; and this we will not stand for.”
King protested that the MIA would do no such thing. But Crenshaw remained adamant and hostile. When King asked what the bus company would concede, Crenshaw said, “We will certainly be willing to guarantee courtesy. But we can’t change the seating arrangement because such a change would violate the law. And as far as bus drivers are concerned, we have no intention now or in the foreseeable future of hiring ‘niggras.’”
King left City Hall, disappointed and angry. How could he have been so naïvely optimistic about Crenshaw and the city fathers? They did not care if his position was sincere and reasonable. They were interested in only one thing: preserving the racial status quo. Even when Negroes sought justice within the system of segregation, the city fathers answered with an irrational no. Oh yes, King told himself, you have learned a hard lesson. You can never persuade the privileged to surrender their privileges on their own. You have to make them do it, keep resisting until they do it. Remember what Hegel said: growth comes through pain and struggle. Well, they would struggle on, then. The bus company could not continue to operate with nearly 70 percent of its patrons gone. If King’s people remained united behind the boycott, whites sooner or later would have to negotiate, or capitulate.
Crenshaw and the city fathers, however, refused to take the boycott seriously. “Comes the first rainy day,” the mayor said with a laugh, “and the Negroes will be back on the buses.”
In fact, it rained the next day. But the Negroes stayed off the buses, most of them trudging to work under umbrellas and newspapers, bundled up against the wet cold. When he observed that, the mayor was certain that Communists were at work in Montgomery.
TO FORCE NEGROES BACK ON THE BUSES, the police commissioner ordered Negro taxi companies to charge the legal minimum rate of forty-five cents per customer, thus ending cheap taxi fares for the boycotters. But King and the MIA moved quickly to meet the crisis. They devised an ingenious car pool—based on a similar operation used in the Baton Rouge boycott—which went into operation on Tuesday, December 13. Volunteer Negro drivers transported people to and from work, operating out of forty-eight dispatch and forty-two pickup stations established in key sections of the city. The car pool was so efficient that a local white judge later praised it as the best transportation system Montgomery had ever known.
In time B. J. Simms of Alabama State took command of the car pool and ran it with military precision. Because of their mutual interest in history and other intellectual concerns, King and Brother B. J. were fairly close and “talked shop” when they were together. Later the MIA added a fleet of new station wagons, registered as church property and known affectionately as “rolling churches” among the boycotters.
Not all Negroes would ride in Brother B. J.’s vehicles. Some preferred to “demonstrate with their feet” their desire for dignity and justice, and they walked to and from work every day, regardless of the weather. Once a car-pool driver chanced on an old woman hobbling along with great difficulty, and he offered her a ride. She waved him on. “I’m not walking for myself. I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.”
Then there was Old Mother Pollard. “Now listen,” King told her at church one night, “you have been with
us all along, so now you go on and start back to ridin’ the bus, ’cause you are too old to keep walking.”
“Oh, no,” she protested, “I’m gonna walk just as long as everybody else walks. I’m gonna walk till it’s over.”
“But aren’t your feet tired?” King asked.
“Yes,” she said, “my feet is tired, but my soul is rested.”
King was delighted. In her “ungrammatical profundity,” he liked to say, Old Mother Pollard captured the very spirit of the “miracle of Montgomery.”
The miracle was manifested in other ways too. When threatened by their white employers, boycotting domestics refused to be intimidated. “Pooh!” said one Negro maid. “My white lady ain’t going to get down and mop that kitchen floor. I know that.” One day an influential matriarch asked her maid, “Isn’t this bus boycott terrible?” “Yes, ma’am,” the black woman said, “it sure is. And I just told all my young ’uns that this kind of thing is white folks’ business and we just stay off the buses till they get this whole thing settled.”
As it happened, some whites were sympathetic and even supportive. “Would you believe,” Brother B. J. said, “that many native-born members of prominent southern families with links that dated back to the cavaliers of Virginia helped and encouraged us and made anonymous contributions? They would call and say, ‘Don’t reveal my name but go to it. We’re all for you.’” When a Negro domestic grew tired of the boycott and returned to the buses, her white employer fired her. “If you have no race pride—if your own people can’t trust you—then I can’t trust you in my house,” the white woman said.
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